COVINGTON, Ga. — Newton County commissioners has voted to effectively halt for months any plans for Covington to annex land for a massive industrial complex on the city’s north end.

The Board of Commissioners voted 3-2 to formally object to a developer’s request for the city to annex 55.8 acres at the intersection of Flat Rock and Gregory roads near Lake Varner. 

The developer of a project named Covington Industrial Park is asking the city to annex the land and rezone the site from Agricultural to Heavy Industrial to allow construction of more than 4 million square feet of warehouse and E-commerce space over the next eight years.

However, some residents Tuesday, Aug. 16, asked the Board of Commissioners to stop the annexation because of its potential impact on the area’s natural resources. 

Matt Crowe of Cornish Mountain Road said the city and county already have seen too much high-density residential and commercial development.

“At some point you need to say, ‘Enough is enough,’” he said.

State law allows a county government in Georgia to object to a city’s proposed annexation of unincorporated land for such reasons as a substantial change in the use of the land or major impacts on the county’s infrastructure, said county attorney Patrick Jaugstetter.

He also said objecting to the annexation would require months of extra legal work by his law firm, Jarrard & Davis, and require expenditures over and above what the county government already pays the firm as its legal counsel.

District 4 Commissioner J.C. Henderson and District 3 Commissioner Alana Sanders said they believed any objection would be a waste of taxpayers’ money after Henderson said his experience showed the city likely would prevail.

Sanders also said Jaugstetter’s explanation of the issue showed it would have little impact on county residents.

District 2 Commissioner Demond Mason countered that he believed any objections should be based on if residents believe it will have a negative impact.

“This board has actually denied several things of this nature. They may not be exactly like that, but we have denied things because our citizenry has made decisions that maybe this is not the best thing for that specific district or that specific area,” Mason said.

“When we denied something like this, we didn’t discuss legal fees,” he said.

“We’ve made decisions in the past that caused this board to incur legal fees that we probably really shouldn’t have, but we did anyway,” Mason added.

District 5 Commissioner Ronnie Cowan made the motion to object based on its possible impact on Lake Varner — which is the

county’s main drinking water source.

It was approved with Cowan, Mason and District 1 Commissioner Stan Edwards voting to object to the annexation and Henderson and Sanders voting not to object.

Jaugstetter said the state government will likely now appoint arbitrators who would preside over a hearing to determine if the annexation can move forward or be done under certain conditions — which would affect any decision to move forward with an annexation because the request was made specifically to develop industrial buildings. 

The attorney told the board the county could make the case that the proposed zoning change — from the least intensive use to the most intensive use — was extreme enough that it wanted to object to it.

Objections also could be raised about the development increasing the demands on the county’s infrastructure — the lake — and the zoning differing substantially from the county’s Future Land Use Map for the area, Jaugstetter said.

However, he also told commissioners that the developers would be required to manage any water runoff from the site. Traffic to the industrial park, when built out, also would only affect the mile or so of main roads between the industrial park and I-20 and not nearby subdivisions, Jaugstetter said.

Covington Planning Director Marc Beechuk told commissioners the city “sees this as an opportunity” but does not have a position on the annexation — only presenting the annexation request to county commissioners as required by state law.